Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perf...ectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Plato's was essentially a dualistic theory. To him, the divine ideas, the universals, the general qualities, the genera, were the ...only real beings, that, like the deities, had an absolute, independent existence. God himself was the supreme idea. The man, the animal, the beautiful, the good, the brave, and so on, represented realities, the archetypes of life of which the individuals, the earthly forms of those general qualities, as they appeared in daily life, were mere shadows and faint replicas.... Aristotle connected the two spheres by seeing the spiritual soul and the intrinsic idea as the formative principle of the body, and, at the same time, as an "entelechy," an innate, ideal goal of the individual that effects evolution. The individuals, then, participate in the essential reality of ideas. This participation becomes effective when man comprehends the ideas and their connections, when he gathers and abstracts the ideas from their multifold, individual manifestation, in short, when he thinks logically. This procedure implied the legitimacy of empirical observation, and of inductive conclusion from observed facts to abstract generalities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

There may perhaps be a new generation of doctors horrified by lacerations, infections, women who have douched with kitchen cleanse...r. What an irony it would be if fanatics continued to kill and yet it was the apathy and silence of the medical profession that most wounded the ability to provide what is, after all, a medical procedure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

There is a current misconception which sees in Jung an early disciple of Freud who subsequently deserted his master. Nothing could... be more misleading. From the very beginning there were differences of procedure and of outlook that were bound to lead to divergent results. Freud's work is based on a scientific method restricted to the principle of causality: that is to say, it is assumed that everything that happens has an explanation in prior causes, and is merely the result of those causes. The world is a mechanism that can be taken to pieces and we can only understand how it works if we know how to dismantle and reassemble its constituent parts. Jung does not deny this causal principle, but he says it is inadequate to explain all the facts. In his view, we live and work, day by day, according to the principle of directed aim or purpose, as well as by the principle of causality. We are drawn onwards and our actions are significant for a future we cannot foresee, and will only be explicable when the final effect of the impulse becomes evident. In other words, life has a meaning as well as an explanation; a meaning, moreover, that we can never finally discover, for it is being extended all the time by the process of evolution.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Why does he not know how to select servants? The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble pe...rsonage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The distinction between the truth of faith and the truth of science leads to a warning, directed to theologians, not to use recent... scientific discoveries to confirm the truth of faith. Microphysics have undercut some scientific hypotheses concerning the calculability of the universe. The theory of quantum and the principle of indeterminacy have had this effect. Immediately religious writers use these insights for the confirmation of their own ideas of human freedom, divine creativity, and miracles. But there is no justification for such a procedure at all, neither from the point of view of physics nor from the point of view of religion. The physical theories referred to have no direct relation to the infinitely complex phenomenon of human freedom, and the emission of power in quantums has direct relation to the meaning of miracles.... The truth of faith cannot be confirmed by latest physical or biological or psychological discoveries--as it cannot be denied by them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The procedure of the novel is to individualize. As with other art forms, what it has to say that is of collective value is said by... inference from individual concrete things. History, on the other hand, proceeds by generalization. It treats people as groups; and when individuals appear they appear as catalysts of large collective actions or as representatives of groups, their significance being that of the group forces, the collection, the sum. This is a difference of convention, and on the conventions of an art depends its special expressiveness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »